Thursday, September 23, 2010
Facebook Said to Be Working on Phones, Zuckerberg Denies It

Facebook is reportedly planning to to create two smartphone devices although the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied it, saying that mobile phones just need to be "more social"

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported on Sep 23 that Facebook had been working with mobile phone maker INQ Mobile Ltd to create two smartphone devices that may have a network tie up with AT&T Inc,

The smartphones would support Facebook's services and were set to be unveiled in Europe in the first half of 2011 and the United States in the second half of the year.

However, Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a TechCrunch interview posted online Wednesday that the online social networking star is not building its own handset. "Our goal is to have Facebook be everywhere and everything be social rather than a specific device," founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying.

"We're not trying to compete with Apple or the Droid (mobile phone from Motorola) or any other hardware manufacturer for that matter."

"Our goal is to make it so that we can design the best integrations in the widest variety of phones," Zuckerberg said, stressing that Facebook was not building a mobile operating system or hardware "from scratch."

Facebook is already providing its software apps to Apple's iPhones and smartphones powered by Google-backed Android software. The company will also put resources to support Microsoft's Windows 7 phones too, which is to be released next month.